Stupid Is As Stupid Does

Just a li’l confusing, that title…eh? It’s just a quote from my all time favorite movie, Forrest Gump. And having said that, this post is, more so than not, a li’l review of that movie. Oh yeah, I know…it’s a li’l too late a review for a movie that’s 11 years old, but what the heck!

Ok, first let me tell you why am posting this now. Well...it so happened that 2 days back I was checking out some community sites and while registering, they all asked me what’s my favorite movie. And, though I have a bunch of them to talk about, Forrest Gump is like the best one. I don’t know many people who like that movie as much as I do. In fact, most of them ask me what’s so special about that movie, that I’d watched it like a million times and can still do it another billion. And the truth is, I don’t know.

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So yesterday, I just let my mind wander into that fascinating world of Forrest Gump. Just wanted to see if I can really figure out why I love it so much. Is it the movie I love, or is it the character?

Directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Tom Hanks in the title role, with a supporting cast of Robin Wright as the love of his life Jenny, Gary Sinise as Lt. Daniel Taylor, Sally Field as his oft-quoted Momma, Forrest Gump was one of the best movies of 1994. It won the Best Picture Oscar for a reason, along with the Best Actor by Tom Hanks. One of the reviews of the movie says…

“Ever find the grind of life getting you down? Is the day-to-day struggle threatening to drag you under? If so, there is a movie out there that can replenish your energy and refresh your outlook. Passionate and magical, Forrest Gump is a tonic for the weary of spirit. For those who feel that being set adrift in a season of action movies is like wandering into a desert, the oasis lies ahead.”

Hanks is by far one of the best actors we have today. He had won the Best Actor Oscar for his role in the movie Philadelphia (1993) and Forrest Gump won him the second, the very next year. In Philadelphia his character, Andrew Beckett, is a gay law graduate with a promising career ahead of him, who finds himself to be having AIDS. The firm he works for fires him for an unjustified cause and he takes his case to a number of lawyers, including Joe Miller (Denzel Washington), a black. But none of them is willing to represent him. . The scene where Andrew comes out of Miller’s office, feeling dejected and alone, is still one of my favorites.

Forrest Gump is basically one simple man's journey through life. And boy! What a journey. The movie opens with Forrest sitting at a bus stop, waiting to go see Jenny after being apart from her for years. Forrest strikes up a conversation or two with the people that come and wait for the bus with him. Or, more accurately, he keeps talking regardless of whether anybody is listening or not.

“Hello. My name's Forrest Gump
You want a chocolate?
I could eat about a million and a half of these. My momma always said life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get. Momma's talking nonsense, of course. You know exactly what you're going to get in a box of chocolates. You just have to read that little piece of card inside the lid.”

Forrest grows up in Greenbow, Alabama, where his mother runs a boarding house. He is a little "slow", his IQ being 75, 5 below the state's definition of "normal", but his mental impairment doesn't bother him, his mother, or his best and only friend, Jenny. In fact, the naiveness that comes through a limited understanding of the world around him gives Forrest a uniquely positive perspective of life. The movie is done as a flashback, with Forrest taking us through all the major events of his life and narrating them. During the three decades of his life that he takes us through, we see him grow up and going through school, college, become a star football player, join the army and become a war hero in Vietnam. He meets the President three times on different occasions…

(Forrest meets President Richard Nixon, who asks him where he is staying, and then offers to put Forrest up in a much nicer hotel. Forrest is shown making a phone call at the hotel to send a maintenance man to the suite, which is being burgled. It turns out to be the Watergate Hotel and implies that the phone call he made began the infamous Watergate scandal, without him ever knowing it!)

…appears in a talk show alongside John Lennon and he even becomes a highly successful businessman in the shrimping business with his fortune invested in “some kind of a fruit company” (oh, and that’s Apple Computers, by the way!!) by his friend. And through it all, there is one defining element in his life: his love for Jenny. She is never far from his thoughts, no matter what he's doing or where he is. He writes to her every single day, even when at war in Vietnam!

It seems Forrest Gump's warm reception was not universal. This is what I found from the net.

Particularly outside the United States, the film was viewed as extended and undeserved praise of ignorant naiveness, a stereotypical trait widely associated with Americans in some quarters. Others note that Gump's successes result from doing what he is told by others, and never showing any of initiative of his own, in contrast to Jenny's more forthright and independent character who is shown descending into drugs, prostitution and death. Still others point out that much like Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire," it was a premature overly generous homage to the Baby Boomer generation. Like Joel's 1989 single, the film celebrates what that generation witnessed (but to which it did not contribute), criticizes what that generation condemned (but to which it does not offer corrections), and yet absolves it of any responsibility for its shortcomings and failures.

But I think Forrest Gump has several messages to convey, some of which are less obvious than others. The most important of them however is a word of advice, not to give up on life. Why surrender when you don't even know what lies ahead or round the corner?

The movie, based on the novel by Winston Groom, is however said to be quite deviating from the book. I haven’t read the book, but really would love to. I haven’t been able to get hold of it, as the ones they sell here is the movie version. Anyways, it seems much of the beginning of the film is the same in the book, albeit Zemeckis's Gump is far more placid and naïve than Groom's abrasive, judgmental cynic. They say the film's quote of "Life is like a box of chocolates" wholly reverses the novel's sentiment of "Being an idiot is no box of chocolates".

Whatever be it, Forrest Gump is my favorite movie and will remain so. But why? Am not so sure yet, but I think it’s mainly because of the innocence of the character, which remains a child in heart and spirit, even as his body grows to maturity. And maybe for the message - never give up on life. And I love the innocence and the hidden wisdom in his seemingly stupid words.

“My momma always said life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're gonna get. Momma's talking nonsense, of course. You know exactly what you're going to get in a box of chocolates. You just have to read that little piece of card inside the lid”

“My momma always said you could tell a lot about a person by the shoes they wear.”

“Stupid is as stupid does.”

[Speaking about his Vietnam days]
“We was always taking these real long walks, looking for this guy named Charlie.”

“The best thing about visiting the President is the food! Now, since it was all free, and I wasn't hungry but thirsty, I must've drank me about fifteen Dr.Peppers.”

[In the Watergate hotel; on phone with security]
“Yeah, sir, you might want to send a maintenance man over to that office across the way. The lights are off, and they must be looking for a fuse box, 'cause them flashlights, they keep me awake.”

[When his girlfriend Jenny runs out of rocks to throw at the house where her father molested her]
“I guess sometimes there just aren't enough rocks.“

[Speaking about Lieutenant Daniel Taylor]
“He was from a long great military tradition. Somebody from his family had fought and died in every single American war. I guess you could say he had a lot to live up to.”

“Bubba was my best good friend. And even I know that ain't something you can find just around the corner.”

“Bubba was gonna be a shrimpin' boat captain, but instead he died right there by that river in Vietnam.”

“That day, for no particular reason, I decided to go for a little run. So I ran to the end of the road. And when I got there, I thought maybe I'd run to the end of town. And when I got there, I thought maybe I'd just run across Greenbow County. And I figured, since I run this far, maybe I'd just run across the great state of Alabama. And that's what I did. I ran clear across Alabama. For no particular reason I just kept on going. I ran clear to the ocean. And when I got there, I figured, since I'd gone this far, I might as well turn around, just keep on going. When I got to another ocean, I figured, since I'd gone this far, I might as well just turn back, keep right on going.”

“My Mama always said you've got to put the past behind you before you can move on.”

“Mama always said, dying was a part of life.”

“We were like peas and carrots, Jenny and I.“

“I don't know if we each have a destiny, or if we're all just floatin' around accidental-like on a breeze. But I, I think maybe it's both.”

[When Lieutenant Daniel Taylor asks him: Have you found Jesus yet, Gump?]
“ I didn't know I was supposed to be looking for him, sir.”

And my personal favorite:
“I may not be a smart man, but I know what love is.”

The tag line for the movie was, "The world will never be the same once you've seen it through the eyes of Forrest Gump"

How true!

The Magic Of The Illusionist

Ever been mesmerized by a magician? I have.

If you ever went for a magic show at the local fair as a kid, and was shocked to see a woman being "cut" in half using a saw and then sighed in relief when she was "joined" again and brought back to life, or was amazed by the guy who got into that empty trunk and just vanished, only to re-emerge from the crowd, am sure you know what am talking about.

Magic is every man’s fantasy. It could be just to amuse people or, for those who don’t believe it’s just an illusion, to make their every wish come true. Who wouldn’t love to make the nasty, useless politicians just vanish with the snap the fingers? Ok, that’s just my wish, ‘coz I just hate them. My point is, everyone has some wish they really wish they could make come true, by magic.

But this post is not about those wishes and how to make them come true. This is about a guy, a cool dude… named David Copperfield. Oh no, not the David who had a tragic and dramatic childhood, fell in love with Emily and Dora and finally married Agnes, as in the Charles Dickens classic. Am talking of that David Copperfield who can make that pesky neighbor of yours vanish in the blink of an eye. The illusionist! The magician!

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Both the audiences and the critics alike have hailed David Copperfield as the greatest illusionist of our time. And I agree. This guy is amazing. He has vanished the Statue of Liberty, walked through the Great Wall of China, levitated himself from the Grand Canyon and made audience members disappear and reappear in places they never ever expected. They say he became the first person to escape from Alcatraz, something that Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly attempted but never succeeded.

I had a VHS tape of his show where he made an airplane surrounded by a ring of spectators, disappear. But the main number was making the Statue of Liberty disappear from the eyes of hundreds of people watching it, from the multiple cameras taking continuous snaps of beautiful women with the Statue in the background from different angles , and the news and TV crews flying in the helicopters around the statue. And an estimated home TV audience of 50 million watched this live. It was one breath taking moment, even on a video.

Now isn’t that amazing? A guy whose résumé lists Statue of Liberty, an airplane, a 70 ton Orient Express train car, apart from the many people and himself as the “things” he’s vanished; and escaping from the Alcatraz prison, from imploding buildings, and a plunge over the Niagara falls, unhurt, as some of his best adventures. How cool is that!

I grew out of the fantasies of being a magician as a kid itself. After watching a handful of guys doing the same stuff… cutting and stitching, floating babes and the here’s the card you picked numbers, I was bored. But later, when I watched this guy in action, I was like…WOW! Magic and illusion can be this exciting? I’ve totally lost interest in those stupid card tricks and the across-the-table magic doesn’t excite me at all. But David Copperfield's tricks? They are different, and he never stopped making the world gasp.

If you never saw this guy in action, try to. Videos are good enough. And to give you a gist, here’s a clip from 15 years of his amazing shows.

Remember. Magic... is just an illusion!

A Few Miles Down Memory Lane

I haven’t posted in a while. I was a li’l too busy at work. And then, I got some time. But I didn’t know what to post about. So I’ve been going through many more blogs on the net. A lot of them had shared their memories and experiences with the netizens and reading them took me down my own memory lane, by a few miles at least. And I wondered. Did I have fun? Did I miss a lot in life? People talk about their college lives with so much excitement, that sometimes I feel bad that I never got to live that life.

Yup! I never experienced the “college-life” as we all know it. ‘Cause after the school days, I ended up in an institute where the word “fun” (as you and I know it) topped the DO-NOT list. When most of my old friends were enjoying the newfound fun in college life, I spent 3 years getting up at 5:30 in the morning and rushing to catch the bus at 6:40am, so that I reach my college by 7:30am, and change into the blue working dress and be in the “section” (oh, we didn’t have classrooms ‘cause we were “precision engineers” in the making, and so it was purely practical…surrounded by dozens of machineries and scores of tools and tones of raw and finished materials!) by 7:48am. It was followed by a hectic day, slogging our asses off, literally. The lessons weren’t in books and it was never something to be done sitting down comfortably. It was really physical and tiring. Hard labor, you could say. The day ended at 5:38pm (Yeah! That’s no exaggeration. Our working hours used to be from 7:48am-5:38pm), and then it’s time to run to the rest room and freshen up and rush to catch the next bus home. Reaching home at 7:30pm, tired and sleepy but no choice, it’s time to take a shower, have something to eat and sit with the assignments. Finish it off by 1am, taking enough care to do it right and neat, ‘cause any crap work, we would end up with a complete re-do command, and o’course that’s on top of the next days load of assignments.

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So you see, college life for me was different. The fun for us there was the tiring works. We used to crib a lot those days, but believe me, after the graduation, we had trouble sitting idle. All of us were looking for jobs that would keep us busy the whole day. But that doesn’t mean we were just working and did nothing else in the college. We had our yearly Xmas celebrations, which used to be the biggest show in that part of the world; we had village camps, tours, cultural nights, sports and games. We had our 45 days of “implant training” when we were sent to a production unit of our college, some 500KM away. And the guy in charge of us was younger to us and so we had our share of fun, which was in fact a huge share. Umm, I think we did have it after all, in the right dosage maybe.

After the third year, we were sent to different companies to work or rather get our “industrial training”. I ended up in a new-to-me city in another state. Coimbatore. The company I got into was sad. It was a horrible place to be. We (that’s two of us) used to do our work from 8:30am to 5pm, but that was a lot for us though (compared to our college that is) ‘cause of the nature of the work. But luckily we were our own bosses there, and in fact boss to a few others too. But life used to be boring, our only entertainment used to be a movie every weekend, or going and staying with our friends who were in the other parts of the same city. Budget was limited, which explains why life was boring, I guess. We had to fight with our manager every month to get our pay, which, after a quick lesson in “how to swear in English”, he used to give us in installments, with a smile. With that li’l cash we used to have our li’l share of fun.

The company was a component supplier for many engineering biggies and the production department used to be “up and running” through the day and night. Our department was to design and manufacture new tools and moulds and also to make sure the production runs smooth. So, more often than not, we used to get “emergency calls” from the production department in the middle of the nights. This became too much to take and we had to do something about it. And, we did too. We used to lock the door from outside and get back in through the back door… and the “emergency calls” used to fall on deaf years. We used to wake up, irritated, but then the knocking stops when they see the door is “locked” and we go back to sleep with a naughty smile. We used to go out every evening just to kill time and walk around and get back to the room after dinner. Sometime we went for late night movies and got back by 2 or 3AM, walking some 5-6KM across the city. Our gates used to be locked and the watchman used to be on his rounds with a Great Dane assisting him. We used to wait for them to go round the corner before jumping the huge wall and sneaking into out room. The watchman seeing us was ok with us, and we never worried about the local police station which was just a stones throw away either. But the dog! Man, he was huge!! The scariest creature I’ve ever confronted.

Then one fine day…communal riots broke out. Bomb blasts killed many later on. We were there through it all. But it never affected our lives in any other way than just multiplying our boredom. The cinemas were closed. No movies for many weeks. Our only entertainment was shut down. Finally, a couple of weeks later, one cinema opened up and was showing Air Force One, the dumb movie starring Harrison Ford. But the public were not ready to go enjoy their lives after the serial blasts, and to add to their scare was a van loaded with explosives which was still ticking. The explosive experts were trying to defuse it. Well, that was in another part of the city. So we went for the movie. I still remember how we entered the hall and saw ourselves being a part of just a handful of the “daring” ones. We watched the movie expecting a bomb to go off under our seat anytime! We actually risked our lives for a dumb movie that showed the heroic tactics of an American President!! Was it worth it? I don’t know. But it was fun.

I had some good habits back then too. Because our fun was limited, we had more time to ourselves in that one year. So I spent the time reading a lot of magazines, novels, classics and even tech manuals. I even read a book that taught me how to fly a helicopter! I just had to get my hands on a machine to try it practically. Oh well, ok, but I could have tried it at least. And then I used to write a lot of letters. I was in touch with a lot of my old friends that way. I also kept a diary, which I used to fill in everyday…in detail. Apart from all that, I learned how to manage my budget. With the measly amount I got every month (trainees, u see), I used to buy a music cassette and a big book to read every month, buy every magazine I need, travel home once a month, watch at least one movie every week and still have enough for the daily chores.

We hated the life back then, and used to count the days, waiting for the training period to get over. However today, so many years later, when I look back, it makes me smile! And I have to admit that it never occurred to me back then that our sufferings would be pleasant memories someday!!

Life. It’s funny sometimes.